They came for the money, they came back for the kids, and when nothing was left to take, they may as well have just laughed.

They set up camp at the scene of the crash. They started their countdown clock. They forced a frown onto their salesman faces. And then Alexis Sanchez was being linked with Inter Milan and, well, must dash.

You think they care, those who move in football’s Really Important circles? You think they give a hoot that Bury have gone? You think they worry about other small concerns following? About something similar befalling Carlisle United and others in years to come, give or take a demon owner or two?

Do they hell. They lick their lips, rub their hands and be thankful that one more nuisance is off the scene. To them football is entertainment, a thing of graphics and headlines and forced glamour and big names and monstrous money.

Not anchors in communities they can’t see. Not the foundations on which their palaces were built.

Calls for the English game to better govern itself, to fit the EFL’s gums with actual teeth, are of course overdue.

The sooner there are proper powers to wield, so as to prevent clubs like Bury from falling to the whims of shady, reckless or opportunist owners, quite clearly the better.

The game’s authorities have proven pathetically ill-equipped. An independent regulator, which many are now demanding, might be a reasonable way to safeguard what is being lost.

It won’t, though, make a jot of difference up the stairs. Where the power truly lies, we at this end do not matter.

We did not matter when other areas of lower-league life were being trampled upon, after all, so why would we matter when the ailing become corpses?

Money heads to the top and is retained there like iron filings to a magnet. Chasing this bonanza makes risk more likely. It does not mean it is law that everyone has to be Stewart Day, with his eye-watering loans, or Steve Dale with his £1 promises and undertaker’s bearing, but the ground for such chancers has been highly fertile for some time.

It is a game of doomed dreams and will lead others into its jaws. At which point, more carcasses to be picked at – although many of the organs have long been taken, transplanted into healthy bodies that did not need them.

Clubs in the bottom tiers are now only useful idiots to those above. Take the Elite Player Performance Plan, the landgrab disguised as premium youth development for the country’s benefit.

As Carlisle have bitterly learned again this week, top clubs can now take players from smaller places sooner than ever, with money little object. They are herded into expensive academies and many are not seen again.

Imagine if every young person in the country went to university and none sought a trade. A land of graduates for jobs that don't exist.

This is where we are in football. Top training grounds bear a few stars but are also full of young people who might have benefited from staying local, learning in the workshop, adding value to themselves and their clubs.

Creating an unnecessary glut of footballers, sucking so much talent towards the top few per cent with so much inevitable waste, is one symptom of the game’s great separation. There are and will be others.

For instance: what, to certain fine minds, will be the logical, long-term solution to the loss of Bury and their like?

B Teams, of course. Little armies of them, marching among the leagues, because, you know, these lads need men’s football, and, well, you don’t get that with the under-23s.

They will get their men’s football, and their social media accounts will buzz (for football is always “buzzing”) with their pointless victories. Those who have to bend the knee? Those who exist for older, deeper reasons, who historically arose for the people around them, rather than for customers who can be tempted the most?

Don’t be silly. You can’t make a high-production gif out of those. An Amazon Prime documentary narrated by a Hollywood star won’t fly from that terrain.

It might not happen now, or tomorrow, and the ever-so-convincing EFL might be jolly certain the Trophy, as we must now call it, is not the “thin end of the wedge”. But a little later?

The @uglygame Twitter account, run by Martin Calladine, once mocked-up a future Trophy line-up. It featured no lower-league clubs and was instead contested by Premier League A, B, C and D teams.

The laughter, upon reading that satire, was bitter. Because you knew that, if push came to shove, Chelsea’s third team would indeed be deemed more interesting than Southend’s first team, Manchester City’s academy fourths more valuable than the best that Rochdale or Grimsby or Carlisle could muster.

So yes, let the game get its poorly-built house in order. Let supporters’ organisations have their principled say. Let the future likes of Steve Dale be regulated into the middle of next week.

Let football do more to protect clubs, their staff, their fans, their circles of genuine importance.

Just don’t think the landscape will change vastly, or that anyone really influential will much bother about what used to be the basis of the people’s game. When the potential death of two proud clubs was the subject of a subscription broadcaster’s big-screen ticking clock on Tuesday, that message was loud, brash and abundantly clear.